League Of Augsburg - Fighting Talk

Just wondering; is there any evidence on whether officers in a battalion wore the karpus? I am inclined to put drummers and sergeants in the karpus, but I am a bit less sure about ensigns, captains etc. Any ideas?

There is very little evidence available on officer uniforms since it was up to the individual officer to purchase his own uniform. But the best guess is that they all preferred tricornes since the karpus was regarded more or less as peasant clothing. This is made even more likely because of the fact that the NCOs generally wore tricornes. Only Västmanland and Närke-Värmland regiments issued karpuses to their NCOs. If any officers in the Swedish army wore karpuses it would most likely have been just those two regiments.

Drummers generally wore the same headgear as the privates.

Thanks Tacitus. I may have painted myself into a bit of a corner with karpus style choice, but this has been useful.

Is there any info regarding units wearing the Karpus, would the whole battalion wear it or was it up to individuals to choose what they wanted to wear?
Cheers
Dave

There are only a few cases of regiments being issued both tricornes and karpuses, so all privates in a regiment would have worn the same headgear (including grenadiers for the most part since they usually did not have grenadier caps).

Tacitus wrote:There are only a few cases of regiments being issued both tricornes and karpuses, so all privates in a regiment would have worn the same headgear (including grenadiers for the most part since they usually did not have grenadier caps).

I forgot to mention in my question that it was the Russians I was asking about, I had a senior moment. Would your answer still be the same for Russians?
Cheers
Dave

I do not have detailed knowledge about Russian uniforms but I would guess that it was the same there. I do not think the Russian army spent more money on their uniforms than the Swedes.

I realise now that neither question in this thread specifically mention the Swedes, but I just assumed that the questions were "Swedish" since the word karpus is Swedish. The Russians called their headgear kartuz and the Norwegian word is kabuds. At least in the case of the Swedish and Norwegian words the origin is the latin word caputium meaning "hood", which was borrowed by the Scandinavian languages in the middle ages (somehow the Swedes managed to mutate the word by adding the letter r). I am not sure if the Russian word has the same etymology.

That was a fair assumption; I did mean Swedes, though I was not specific.